Cloning is an operation consisting in the duplication of a data structure, usually to avoid the aliasing problem of having different code modify the same instance in inconsistent ways. In PHP, cloning can be accomplished in multiple ways - and in some cases it can be avoided altogether.

He talks some about how objects are passed around internally during the PHP execution and how you can tell if a function works with data by reference (from the manual). He then looks at the "clone" keyword and what kinds of things are duplicated from an object when it is used. He briefly touches on the "__clone" magic method for solving the "shallow clone" problem and how, possibly, serializing the object might be a better alternative for reproducing the entire object.

Often I find absolutely competent programmers, who aren't involved in open source, either because they don't know how to approach a project, or because they just aren't sure how the process even works. In this article we'll look at one example, the conference feedback site joind.in, and how you can use GitHub to start contributing code to this project. Since so many projects are hosted on github, this will help you get started with other projects, too.

She covers all you'll need to know to get in and get going with Github - forking a current repo (she uses Joind.in as an example), cloning your fork, making updates and submitting them as a pull request back to the main project. There's also some things about general git topics like branching, merging from the upstream source and using "git log" to view the changes.

In addition to having the convenience of existing as a git repo itself, moving this content to GitHub will help distinguish EllisLab and Reactor created content from community managed resources. It will also reduce the attraction of spammers to the CodeIgniter.com web site, as the wiki was a common location used by spammers and vandals to get content on our site that was less likely to be found and moderated than the frequently visited forums.

You can make changes if you see something incorrect by cloning the repo and making changes to the wiki repo and putting in a pull request.

The migration of the PHP source code from Subversion to Git is complete. You can clone or fork the source from our GitHub mirror, and we also now support pull requests made via GitHub. The source is also available via git.php.net, and full instructions on cloning the php-src tree can be found at php.net/git. One immediate benefit is that future PHP release tags will be signed by the PHP development team. We will be releasing GPG keys for verification purposes in the next few days. More information on the migration and the new workflow can be found at the Moving to Git FAQ on the PHP Wiki.

This move does not include the manuals yet, but that's coming soon. Be sure to follow these steps if you'd like to contribute back via the git repository. This is a great move for the project and makes it even easier for developers to contribute their fixes and ideas back to the development group!

Joshua Thijssen has also posted a guide to getting started on his blog.

At the end of the script the interpreter frees the memory. Actually every object has a built-in destructor, just like it has built-in constructor. So even we don't define it explicitly, the object has its destructor. Usually this destructor is executed at the end of the script, or whenever the object isn't needed anymore. This can happen, for instance, at the end of a function body. Now if we call the destructor explicitly, which as I said I've seen many times, here's what happen. As you can see calling the destructor explicitly doesn't destroy the object. So the question is...how to destroy an object before the script stops?

He points out that one way to "destroy" an object is to null it out and remove the structure from memory. This is tricky, though, because a clone of the object will still exist in memory, just not the original.

symfony1 is well and alive and many developers are now using it for projects hosted on Git. But as the official symfony 1 repository is hosted on Subversion, it's not always easy to get things versioned easily. As of today, this becomes much more easier. If you are using Git and symfony1, you can now use the official symfony1 Git clone.

There are branches for each of the major 1.x releases as well as tags for some of the minor releases. You can, of course, still access the latest packages directly via the symfony website.

I'm currently looking for a good PHP framework to do a new project. I recently used Kohana 3 at on a project for a client but I needed something lighter and having used Sinatra and Padrino previously but needing it PHP based I did the next natural step - searched for PHP Sinatra clones.

There's four frameworks that made the list - all in varying states of development:

• Limonade
• Fat Free Framework
• Slim
• Fitzgerald

Since I have a crazy workload right now, I feel this is the perfect time to write a quick n' dirty tutorial on how to build your very own Popurls. Impress your friends and/or boss with a nifty, hand made news aggregator. Yes, very buzz word friendly.

He uses the SimplePie library to pull in the information from various feeds including Digg.com, Reddit.com, Wired's news feed and Engadget. He shows how to use regular expressions to extract information from the feeds (if they're uncooperative), a bit of PHP to work around potentially empty fields and the full jQuery/HTML/CSS you'll need to make it look more like this

In this fifth part of a seven-part tutorial on magic functions, we'll briefly review the sleep and wakeup functions, and then tackle the clone function. [...] So, with that goal in mind, in this fifth part of the series I'm going to take a closer look at the "__clone()" method, which as its name suggests, is called behind the scenes when using the "clone" PHP keyword.

Their example code adds on to the previous examples using "__get" and "__set" and adds in a method to catch the cloning of an object. It only outputs a string ("Cloning user object") when its called, but it lets you get the idea.

If you're anything like me, you've already wondered how easy it would be to make your own'"perhaps you'd like to set up a microblog for you and your colleagues to share links and have discussions. [...] Today we'll look at three new solutions that are easy to set up, have reasonably modest hosting requirements, and even include some features that blow Twitter out of the water.

They suggest three tools:

• the P2 plugin for WordPress
• the Motion plugin for Movable Type
• Laconica (the platform that Identica runs on, a full Twitter clone with other added features)

Each of these comes with a description of installation, features offered and use.